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Use virtiofsd for sharing file system data with host
Switch over to using virtiofsd for sharing file system data with the host. virtiofs is a file system designed for the needs of virtual machines and environments. That is in contrast to 9P fs, which we currently use for sharing data with the host, which is first and foremost a network file system. 9P is problematic if for no other reason that it lacks proper support for usage of the "open-unlink-fstat idiom", in which files are unlinked and later referenced via file descriptor (see danobi#83). virtiofs does not have this problem. This change replaces usage of 9P with that of virtiofs. In order to work, virtiofs needs a user space server. The current state-of-the-art implementation (virtiofsd) is implemented in Rust and so we interface directly with the library. Most of this code is extracted straight from virtiofsd, as it's a lot of boilerplate. An alternative approach is to install the binary via distribution packages or from crates.io, but availability (and discovery) can be a bit of a challenge. Note that this now means that both libcap-ng as well as libseccomp need to be installed. I benchmarked both the current master as well as this version with a bare-bones custom kernel: Benchmark 1: target/release/vmtest -k bzImage-9p 'echo test' Time (mean ± σ): 1.316 s ± 0.087 s [User: 0.462 s, System: 1.104 s] Range (min … max): 1.232 s … 1.463 s 10 runs Benchmark 1: target/release/vmtest -k bzImage-virtiofsd 'echo test' Time (mean ± σ): 1.244 s ± 0.011 s [User: 0.307 s, System: 0.358 s] Range (min … max): 1.227 s … 1.260 s 10 runs So it seems there is a ~0.7s speed up, on average (and significantly less system time being used). This is great, but I suspect a more pronounced speed advantage will be visible when working with large files, in which virtiofs is said to significantly outperform 9P (typically >2x from what I understand, but I have not done any benchmarks of that nature). A few other notes: - we solely rely on guest level read-only mounts to enforce read-only state. The virtiofsd recommended way is to use read-only bind mounts [0], but doing so would require root. - we are not using DAX, because it still is still incomplete and apparently requires building Qemu (?) from source. In any event, it should not change anything functionally and be solely a performance improvement. I have adjusted the configs, but because I don't have Docker handy I can't really create those kernel. CI seems incapable of producing the artifacts without doing a fully-blown release dance. No idea what empty is about, really. I suspect the test failures we see are because it lacks support? Some additional resources worth keeping around: - https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/howto-boot.html - https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/howto-qemu.html [0] https://gitlab.com/virtio-fs/virtiofsd/-/blob/main/README.md?ref_type=heads#faq [1] https://gitlab.com/virtio-fs/virtiofsd/-/blob/main/src/main.rs?ref_type=heads#L1242 Closes: danobi#16 Closes: danobi#83 Signed-off-by: Daniel Müller <deso@posteo.net>
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